I’ve been building Verbs in the Siboot storyworld using SWAT, and getting them all fleshed out with their features. I’ve run into a nasty problem involving inversion, once again. It seems that the problems of inversion will never abate. Anyway, the problem this time arose with the Verb ‘greet’. You can set a tone to the greeting by attaching an aura to it. But how do you specify whether the aura is inverted? I had earlier intended to make an inverted form of the aura available as a word, but it’s an ActorTrait, and if I want to have an aura for ‘good’ and another aura for ‘ungood’, then I need two separate ActorTraits.
One solution would be to set up both ActorTraits, and then have some simple calculation that sets the Ungood value to be the inverse of the Good value. But that’s a dirty solution that just begs for horrible bugs down the road.
Another solution requires me to add a Quantifier to the aura. This is now feasible because I have reduced the Quantifier count to three. It would not be difficult to present the player with seven auras from which to choose (three negative, three positive, one zero).
The flaw in this solution is that every single use of an aura would require a quantifier to provide for its inversion. However, after looking over the use of auras in existing Verbs, I conclude that this would not be a problem. It also establishes a user interface standard: every aura must be quantified.
I think this will work.